Here Comes Trouble - Michael Moore [18]
In the early 1950s, old Mr. Hill sold off his farmland, and it was turned into this plat of twenty-seven homes on these two mostly invisible and nondescript streets. The houses were primarily of a post-war Levittown nature: small, quaint, necessary. They were filled with the families of the new middle class. There was hope and hostility in these 900-square-foot structures. There were big backyards that, in the early years, all blended into each other, but eventually had to be sectioned off with wood fences and thick hedges. “We” became “me” in less than a decade, but for a while the entire neighborhood felt like one big summer camp.
At each dead end of Hill Street lay an open field. In the field to the west we would have “dirt clod” fights: the goal was to pick up hard-packed pieces of earth and hurl them into the eyes of your friends. Each spring we would take my dad’s riding lawn mower and carve out a baseball diamond, where we would meet every day of the summer and play baseball until sunset. The field on the east end of the street was where we would set up “camp” with makeshift tents of our dads’ discarded tarps and blankets, the neighborhood headquarters where all things delinquent were planned.
The forest behind our houses on Hill Street was vast and seemed to extend so deep that none of us ever found the end of it, no matter how many hours we trekked through its tall pines, thick maples, and white birches. The “woods,” as we called it, was an amusement park of nature where we could fish, hunt, trap, camp, get lost. To get to these woods you had to cross through the open backyards of four neighbors and none of them ever seemed to mind. A large swamp separated the yards from the woods, and the swamp itself held much sway over us. We learned to leap from one fallen tree to another to avoid getting a “soaker.” The water wasn’t more than knee-deep, and there were no critters that might cause us harm. There were hundreds of frogs, though, and we did our best to catch them, though usually the frogs were faster and smarter. There were flowers of all kinds and a requisite number of mosquitoes that appreciated our presence as little walking blood banks for their dining pleasure.
After crossing the swamp you found yourself at the foot of a hill that, frozen in the winter, became our sledding playground. At the top of the hill began the footpath that took us deep into the infinite woods. We would hike for hours, though no one used the word hike, as that implied a planned activity. None of what we did in our free time as kids was ever planned or structured in any way. It just was. An hour of homework and then “git outside and git the stink blown off ya!” were the orders from our dads.
We stalked deer and rabbits and coons; we had BB guns and bows and arrows, and occasionally the boys next door brought out their bird gun so we could shoot pheasants. And we were ten. Heaven. The adults left us alone, and we went on many expeditions in those woods, packing lunches of Spam, which we would cook on our “buddy burners,” empty tin cans with a wad of cardboard tightly stuffed inside and covered with the wax we would melt and drip over it. Later, we would light our buddy burners, and the waxed cardboard would burn slow enough to grill our Spam. More Heaven.
Girls were excluded from all these activities, except the sledding. Our parents would make us take them up the hill and force us to ride the sled down the hill with them. After all, who but a boy was qualified to do the steering? We actually enjoyed this immensely, as we were able to scare the bejesus out of the girls by pretending to steer the fast-moving sled into a tree—but pulling out at the last instant. Usually. There was the occasional crash and crying baby sister, but even that brought us great happiness.